The Mandelson scandal exposes Labour’s flaming hypocrisy

To misquote Jeffrey Epstein, ‘Bad Petey’.

We already knew from previous releases of the Epstein Files that Peter Mandelson was overly chummy with the world’s most notorious nonce. We’d seen the photos of Mandy in various Ken-like outfits chatting with his ‘best pal’. We’d read his birthday wishes to the dodgy financier who just loved to share his ‘glorious homes… with his friends (yum yum)’. And we knew that he’d urged Epstein to ‘fight for early release’ after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.

But now we know just how corrupt their relationship was, thanks to the latest dump from the Epstein files. First, we discovered that during the 2000s, Mandelson allegedly received three separate donations of $25,000 from Epstein, plus an extra £10,000 for Mandelson’s future husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, to complete an osteopathy course. Now, thanks to journalists digging through the mounds of released correspondence, it has emerged that Epstein potentially received something in return: a stream of confidential, forwarded emails straight from No10.

Most of these date from Mandelson’s time as secretary of state for business and de facto deputy prime minister, between 2008 and 2010 – the precise period when Gordon Brown’s Labour government was struggling to respond to the global financial crisis. No wonder a financier like Epstein was eager to hear from him. It now appears that Mandelson disclosed confidential information regarding the government’s plans to sell off £20 billion in assets; leaked plans for a bailout of the euro the day before they were announced; and even let slip Brown’s post-election departure from Downing Street long before the public knew. ‘Finally got him to go today’, Mandelson apparently told Epstein in an email on 10 May 2010, after the then PM had given up on attempts to form a coalition government with the Lib Dems.

It seems as if Mandelson, New Labour’s Mr Big, was effectively leaking politically and market-sensitive information to a US businessman, one who had recently been convicted of sex offences involving a minor, no less. It is, as they say, not a good look. Little wonder that not-so-poor Petey could now face a criminal investigation for misconduct in public office and will be stepping down from the House of Lords.

This is surely the end of Mandelson in public life. But it also casts a less than flattering light on the current Labour government. After all, weren’t Keir Starmer and his gang of preening middle managers meant to be ‘cleaning up our politics’? Weren’t they supposed to provide an antidote to the much-trumpeted sleaze, cronyism and ‘chumocracy’ of the Tory years? That’s certainly what they have been repeatedly telling us over the past few years. When seeking election in 2024, Starmer solemnly promised he was going to restore ‘standards in public life’ should he ever get into government.

And yet these self-same crusaders against ‘Tory sleaze’ made Mandelson, of all people, Britain’s ambassador to the US in December 2024. They droned on and on about the supposedly endless wickedness of their opponents, and then they appointed someone nicknamed the ‘Prince of Darkness’ to the most important diplomatic position in government.

Of course, those who pushed for his appointment and those close to Mandelson in the current government, from Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, to health secretary Wes Streeting, will not have known all the grubby details of Mandelson’s dealings with Epstein, from the dressing-gown meet-ups to the email leaks. But they all knew what Mandelson was like. This archetype of Britain’s managerial political elite, slipping and sliding around globalist hubs for years, had always struggled to separate his political dealings from his personal self-interest.

Mandelson was sacked as minister without portfolio by Tony Blair in 1998, after failing to declare a £373,000 loan from his wealthy friend and then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson. He was sacked again, as Northern Ireland secretary in 2001, after he’d been exposed helping out millionaire Labour donors Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja with their passport applications. Even after he’d temporarily departed Westminster in 2004, to work on his tan as Britain’s European commissioner in the EU, he was still up to his old tricks. In 2008, it emerged that Mandelson had been partying on the superyacht of Russia’s then richest man, Oleg Deripaska, in 2005. He then granted trade concessions to the oligarch worth up to £50million a year.

Mandelson was always within smelling distance of trouble. He had always been known to love the high life, to mix it with other members of the transnational political and business class that flourished from the 1990s onwards. He was a creature of that globalist world of low morals and high commerce. And he had the scandals to his name to prove it. Heck, even his intimacy with Epstein has long been common knowledge – a 2019 internal report on Epstein by JP Morgan filed to a New York court said that the convicted sex offender ‘maintain[ed] a particularly close relationship with… Lord Mandelson, a senior member of the British government’.

Despite all this, Starmer’s self-righteous crusaders against Tory sleaze thought nothing of giving this walking sleaze-magnet a plum diplomatic role. Mandelson is a reminder of the rottenness of New Labour – Tony Blair, let’s not forget, was twice interviewed under caution by the police in 2007, over the cash-for-honours scandal. He is also a reminder of the eye-watering hypocrisy of the current Labour government.

Starmer et al have constantly painted themselves as morally superior to their party-political opponents. Yet beneath that now-peeling veneer, their own less-than-squeaky-clean behaviour is all too visible. There was the Lord Ali affair, in which the yoof-TV mogul and Labour peer invested tens of thousands of pounds in the wardrobes of the Labour cabinet. There was then deputy PM Angela Rayner’s stamp-duty dodge on a seaside pad in Hove, East Sussex. And, of course, as this week’s headlines attest, there was the presence among them of Peter Mandelson – a man who when he wasn’t betraying the British state was lounging around in his undies at Jeffrey Epstein’s expense.

Labourites have spent so long portraying themselves as the Good People that they have come to believe their own hype. They really think their political tribe is almost beyond reproach, because they are the virtuous ones. Mandelson, the New Labour turd that is finally being flushed, has ended this moralising myth once and for all.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.